Sorry

Programmers, tech support jockeys, system admins, and just about everyone else in the IT world -- they're just like the rest of us. They can prattle on about whether the Google Nexus One is a wonderful new phone or just a knockoff of the great iPhone. There are dozens of little enhancements, like a 5-megapixel camera with a real lens, that suggest Google and HTC collaborated to build something wonderful. There are also dozens of quirks that might lead a discerning UI expert to the conclusion that Apple did it first and continues to build a better device.

Those are all fair topics that can carry a conversation through several rounds of drinks, but tech-savvy customers should blip over these details. There's another big reason for choosing Android: Much of the software is open source, and Google is substantially more sympathetic to letting us do whatever we want with the new toy for which we paid so much of our hard-earned money. The SDK is open, and you don't have to use the official Android Market to distribute your code. Compare that with the very polite phone call I got just yesterday from someone at Apple's Dev Center reminding me that if I don't cough up another $100, they will remove my not-so-hot-selling apps from their store.

This flexibility offers such a great advantage that it alone should make Android phones the better choice than the iPhone for anyone with the ability to code a loop. Apple blocked a number of programs that come with code interpreters, out of fear that someone might reprogram the phones or use the interpreter as a backdoor to do something evil. That might be possible, but Apple's lockdown eliminates the ability to create apps that anyone can customize with a language more powerful than a check box or a pull-down menu. If you want to write scripts to customize your workload, you can skip the iPhone.

At the moment, most Android apps look like good starts. They seem to work well enough, but they're just not as polished as the apps I've seen in the iPhone world. There are a few worthwhile suggestions, but the market is still making its way through gimmicky apps like iFart. After that, I'm sure the programmers will turn to real apps -- these small, pocket-sized devices are ideal platforms for extending the office and the workplace. Meanwhile, here is a quick tour of some of today's Android tools that make life easier for IT professionals.

Peter Wayner is contributing editor at InfoWorld and the author of more than 16 books on diverse topics, including open source software, autonomous cars, privacy-enhanced computation, digital transactions, and steganography.